ABSTRACT
Teacher education has an institutional public aspect, which in many places acts as an important influence, even a constraint, on development, while supporting the aims of raising and maintaining standards of teaching and contributing to the professionalism of teachers. This chapter highlights teacher education as a growing research area within applied linguistics. It looks at different issues in teacher preparation, the contrast between training and education, the kinds of qualifications for different branches of the profession just in one country, and the development of research on modes of supervision of teachers, on training the supervisors, and on the nature of teacher development itself. In order to teach anything, the teacher must have a degree of mastery over the subject matter. For the foreign language teacher, this gives rise to the frustrating situation that what might take somebody 10 years to master even before they take the training necessary to teach it is someone else's birthright.
